Archives For Safety

The practice of safety engineering in various high consequence industries.

It is highly questionable whether total system safety is always enhanced by allocating functions to automatic devices rather than human operators, and there is some reason to believe that flight-deck automation may have already passed its optimum point.

If you want to know where Crew Resource Management as a discipline started, then you need to read NASA Technical Memorandum 78482 or “A Simulator Study of the Interaction of Pilot Workload With Errors, Vigilance, and Decisions” by H.P. Ruffel Smith, the British borne physician and pilot. Before this study it was hours in the seat and line seniority that mattered when things went to hell. After it the aviation industry started to realise that crews rose or fell on the basis of how well they worked together, and that a good captain got the best out of his team. Today whether crews get it right, as they did on QF72, or terribly wrong, as they did on AF447, the lens that we view their performance through has been irrevocably shaped by the work of Russel Smith. From little seeds great oaks grow indeed.

The search for MH370 will end next tuesday with the question of it’s fate no closer to resolution. There is perhaps one lesson that we can glean from this mystery, and that is that when we have a two man crew behind a terrorist proof door there is a real possibility that disaster is check-riding the flight. As Kenedi et al. note in a 2016 study five of the six recorded murder-suicide events by pilots of commercial airliners occurred after they were left alone in the cockpit, in the case of both the Germanwings 9525 or LAM 470 this was enabled by one of the crew being able to lock the other out of the cockpit. So while we don’t know exactly what happened onboard MH370 we do know that the aircraft was flown deliberately to some point in the Indian ocean, and on the balance of the probabilities that was done by one of the crew with the other crew member unable to intervene, probably because they were dead.

As I’ve written before the combination of small crew sizes to reduce costs, and a secure cockpit to reduce hijacking risk increases the probability of one crew member being able to successfully disable the other and then doing exactly whatever they like. Thus the increased hijacking security measured act as a perverse incentive for pilot murder-suicides may over the long run turn out to kill more people than the risk of terrorism (1). Or to put it more brutally murder and suicide are much more likely to be successful with small crew sizes so these scenarios, however dark they may be, need to be guarded against in an effective fashion (2).

One way to guard against such common mode failures of the human is to implement diverse redundancy in the form of a cognitive agent whose intelligence is based on vastly different principles to our affect driven processing, with a sufficient grasp of the theory of mind and the subtleties of human psychology and group dynamics to be able to make usefully accurate predictions of what the crew will do next. With that insight goes the requirement for autonomy in vetoing of illogical and patently hazardous crew actions, e.g ”I’m sorry Captain but I’m afraid I can’t let you reduce the cabin air pressure to hazardous levels”. The really difficult problem is of course building something sophisticated enough to understand ‘hinky’ behaviour and then intervene. There are however other scenario’s where some form of lesser AI would be of use. The Helios Airways depressurisation is a good example of an incident where both flight crew were rendered incapacitated, so a system that does the equivalent of “Dave! Dave! We’re depressurising, unless you intervene in 5 seconds I’m descending!” would be useful. Then there’s the good old scenario of both the pilots falling asleep, as likely happened at Minneapolis, so something like “Hello Dave, I can’t help but notice that your breathing indicates that you and Frank are both asleep, so WAKE UP!” would be helpful here. Oh, and someone to punch out a quick “May Day” while the pilot’s are otherwise engaged would also help tremendously as aircraft going down without a single squawk recurs again and again and again.

I guess I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that two man crews while optimised for cost are distinctly sub-optimal when it comes to dealing with a number of human factors issues and likewise sub-optimal when it comes to dealing with major ‘left field’ emergencies that aren’t in the QRM. Fundamentally a dual redundant design pattern for people doesn’t really address the likelihood of what we might call common mode failures. While we probably can’t get another human crew member back in the cockpit, working to make the cockpit automation more collaborative and less ‘strong but silent’ would be a good start. And of course if the aviation industry wants to keep making improvements in aviation safety then these are the sort of issues they’re going to have to tackle. Where is a good AI, or even an un-interuptable autopilot when you really need one?

Notes

1. Kenedi (2016) found from 1999 to 2015 that there had been 18 cases of homicide-suicide involving 732 deaths.

So here’s a question for the safety engineers at Airbus. Why display unreliable airspeed data if it truly is that unreliable?

In slightly longer form. If (for example) air data is so unreliable that your automation needs to automatically drop out of it’s primary mode, and your QRH procedure is then to manually fly pitch and thrust (1) then why not also automatically present a display page that only provides the data that pilots can trust and is needed to execute the QRH procedure (2)? Not doing so smacks of ‘awkward automation’ where the engineers automate the easy tasks but leave the hard tasks to the human, usually with comments in the flight manual to the effect that, “as it’s way too difficult to cover all failure scenarios in the software it’s over to you brave aviator” (3). This response is however something of a cop out as what is needed is not a canned response to such events but rather a flexible decision and situational awareness (SA) toolset that can assist the aircrew in responding to unprecedented events (see for example both QF72 and AF447) that inherently demand sense-making as a precursor to decision making (4). Some suggestions follow:

Provide an obvious and intuitive way to to remove a faulted channel allowing flight under reversionary laws (7).

Inform aircrew as to the specific protection mode activation and the reasons (i.e. flight data) triggering that activation (8).

As aviation systems get deeper and more complex this need to support aircrew in such events will not diminish, in fact it is likely to increase if the past history of automation is any guide to the future.

Notes

1. The BEA report on the AF447 disaster surveyed Airbus pilots for their response to unreliable airspeed and found that in most cases aircrew, rather sensibly, put their hands in their laps as the aircraft was already in a safe state and waited for the icing induced condition to clear.

2. Although the Airbus Back Up Speed Display (BUSS) does use angle-of-attack data to provide a speed range and GPS height data to replace barometric altitude it has problems at high altitude where mach number rather than speed becomes significant and the stall threshold changes with mach number (which it doesn’t not know). As a result it’s use is 9as per Airbus manuals) below 250 FL.

3. What system designers do, in the abstract, is decompose and allocate system level behaviors to system components. Of course once you do that you then need to ensure that the component can do the job, and has the necessary support. Except ‘apparently’ if the component in question is a human and therefore considered to be outside’ your system.

4. Another way of looking at the problem is that the automation is the other crew member in the cockpit. Such tools allow the human and automation to ‘discuss’ the emerging situation in a meaningful (and low bandwidth) way so as to develop a shared understanding of the situation (6).

5. For example in the Airbus design although AoA and Mach number are calculated by the ADR and transmitted to the PRIM fourteen times a second they are not directly available to aircrew.

6. Yet another way of looking at the problem is that the principles of ecological design needs to be applied to the aircrew task of dealing with contingency situations.

7. For example in the Airbus design the current procedure is to reach up above the Captain’s side of the overhead instrument panel, and deselect two ADRs…which ones and the criterion to choose which ones are not however detailed by the manufacturer.

8. As the QF72 accident showed, where erroneous flight data triggers a protection law it is important to indicate what the flight protection laws are responding to.

With a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s in Systems Engineering, Matthew Squair is a principal consultant with Jacobs Australia. His professional practice is the assurance of safety, software and cyber-security, and he writes, teaches and consults on these subjects. He can be contacted at mattsquair@gmail.com